Recipes: Dipping Sauces

October 22, 2013

If you live in the northern hemisphere, it’s hard to escape
pumpkins and various hard fall/winter squashes these days. They’re displayed by the
front doors of grocery stores and end-caps in the produce section. Farmers are
bringing them to our weekly markets and there are better and bigger selections
at Asian grocers. Halloween-carved pumpkins and related holiday decor are front
and center in store ads and people’s lawns. Food magazines are loaded with photos and recipes for squash-centric dishes for Thanksgiving
celebrations. It's a food that screams autumn in color and evokes the coziness of the cooler weather ahead.

In Vietnamese, a generic term for squash is bi and one with red/orange/yellow flesh (e.g.,
pumpkin, kabocha and butternut) is bi do.
We bought a pumpkin to carve for Halloween a couple of weeks ago but instead of
thinking about cutting into it for decoration, I pondered hard squash and
pumpkin recipes.

No, I’m not saying I cook with pumpkins raised for carving.
They don’t taste good. We mistakenly bought a wedge of Cinderella pumpkin from
a Mexican market last month and it looked gorgeous in the oven but tasted blah
on the plate. At the store, I recognized it in its cut form as a decorative
pumpkin but since it was sold under the auspices of being good for cooking, I
tried it out. Don’t do it. It’s not worth it.

For cooking, I like kabocha (can’t lose with this Asian
favorite), butternut (sweet, creamy orange flesh), kuri (has a chestnut-like
texture and flavor), and banana (firm flesh, conveniently sold in sections at
supermarkets). I’ve been meaning to try baby cooking pumpkins as they’d
probably work well in recipes.

August 20, 2013

Last year Washington
Post food editor Joe Yonan came to my home for an afternoon of tofu. We
made tofu from scratch and I prepared a little snack of Indonesian tofu and egg
pancakes. A bachelor, Joe was working on a vegetarian cookbook for single
folks. Eat Your Vegetables, which just released, is a follow-up to Joe’s
earlier work, Serve Yourself. Joe
celebrates the single diner but his work isn’t just for bachelors and bachelorettes. Many of the recipes
(like the one below) are for regular quantities of food that you can keep for
days, or weeks. Other recipes can be doubled or quadrupled for more people; we
are a household of two people so the math is simple. I was intrigued by the
book because as a writer and recipe reader, I’m always wondering about scaling
up or scaling down things. I also enjoy many solo lunches when my husband is at
work.

Joe’s message is that single people shouldn’t be limited
to an eating life of bad tasting or unhealthy food. Eat Your Vegetables helps cooks to create a system of home cooking
and eating, something that many people used to learn from their mothers or
grandmothers. While Joe’s books are for the single person, he encourages people
to cook for others too. (Maybe you won’t be single forever?!) There are recipes
for entertaining, pantry items, as well as the freezer.

July 02, 2013

If you’re into ketchup or
tinkering with homemade condiments, try this umami-laden ketchup. I came up
with the recipe several years ago and my husband reminded me about it last
week, when we were eating the Filipino spicy banana ketchup. “Ketchup
originated in Asia so what’s the big deal about making it from bananas? You
made that one with fish sauce,” he said.

Oh, right. Western ketchup
borrows its name from the Amoy Chinese (Hokkien/Fujian) term ketsiap, which means fermented fish
sauce and is related to the Malay term kechap
(now written as kecap, i.e., delectable
kecap manis sweet soy sauce). The
word and sauce was transported to Europe by Dutch traders, and over time, the
original Asian condiment became transformed into many kinds of ketchup. I’ve
read about mushroom and walnut-based ketchups but it’s the tomato version that
reigns supreme on our modern tables.

June 27, 2013

Earlier this year, I did an Asian hot sauce tasting for Bon
Appetit magazine that included Filipino banana ketchup. I bought bottles of the
leading brand, Jufran, and frankly, the stuff was oddly fake tasting in the
banana department. There are many kinds of bananas in Southeast Asia and their
funky fermented characteristics were in the sauces, as well as a ton of sugar.
It was also bright red, practically like nail polish. I wondered what the real
stuff was like.

What’s the back story on banana ketchup? Filipinos love
American ketchup but during World War II, they had a tomato shortage. One woman
resourcefully came up with a knockoff made with bananas. (If you’ve been to
Southeast Asia, you know that bananas are ubiquitous and the many varieties are extra delicious.) Banana ketchup,
also known as banana sauce, was a local hit and became as popular as ketchup,
writes Marvin Gapultos in his debut book, The
Adobo Road. As a result, anywhere Filipinos went, they brought their
ketchup with them.

April 30, 2012

While I’ve cooked with Chinese fermented black beans for years, I didn’t realized how versatile they were until I had about 2 pounds of them on hand, leftover from working on the Asian Market Shopper mobile app and the Asian Tofu cookbook.

The little beans are not the same as what you cook up for a pot of cuban black beans! In fact, they are slightly moist and soft, a preserved seasoning ingredient used in many southern Chinese (Cantonese) kitchens. Expect salty, pungent, and winy qualities from the beans.

Wanting to use them up, I started cooking with them, mining my Chinese cookbook collection for recipes and ideas. When I was through, I had enough information about fermented black beans (dou chi in Mandarin, dul see in Cantonese, dau/tau xi in Vietnamese) and a small collection of delectable recipes.